Work the System

The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less

Sam Carpenter

• Editorial: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781626347700
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Management

A simple mindset tweak will change your life. ?It started with a midnight insight. After a fifteen-year nightmare of coping with his struggling business, Sam Carpenter discovered and then developed a simple methodology that knocked his routine 80-hour workweek down to zero, while multiplying his net income by a factor of 100. Now, in 2021, here's his bestselling business book, revised yet again, showing how you too can instantly break free to build the business and life of your dreams. In this fourth edition of Work the System, Carpenter reveals the profound insight and exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business—and his life—around. Once you "get" this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to: · Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever.
· See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control.
· Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life.
· Stop fire killing and become a fire-control specialist.
· Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees.
· Identify insidious "errors of omission."
· Maximize your biological and mechanical "prime time" so that you are working at optimum efficiency.
· Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, create it! You can keep doing what you've always done and continue getting unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you've always wanted by transforming your businesses or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs smoothly and profitably on autopilot.

PART ONE

THE SYSTEMS MINDSET

CHAPTER 1

Control Is a Good Thing

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.

—PATRICIA (MEG RYAN) FROM THE MOVIE JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (WARNER BROS. PICTURES, AMBLIN ENTERTAINMENT, 1990)

FOR MANY, HEARING a version of the adage “To get what you want, you must have more control” evokes the knee-jerk response that seeking control is a bad thing. They counter that one should relax and go with the flow, stay loose, and not worry so much about details . . . and that seeking more and more control can only mean one is devolving into a nervous control freak. There is an almost cosmological sense—a carryover through the generations from the ’60s, no doubt—that “we’re all one,” and the problems in our lives and the world around us are created by people who don’t share our brand of let-it-be spirituality. If my boss, my spouse, my parents, my children, my neighbor, and my government would just lighten up and be sensible—like me—then everyone would be happy!

Confident in the truth of it but confounded by reality, too many of us are eager to proclaim that the states of our lives—and the conditions of the world—are not good. We exhort that people are too uptight, too concerned with tiny details.

Allow me to retort.

Notwithstanding the possible at-the-atomic-level truth of “we’re all one,” it’s my contention that being in control of the details of our lives is mandatory if we are to find peace and success—if we are to find happiness. Conversely, while we’re focusing on those factors that are in our control, we must lighten up about those that are not. If we attempt to influence events that we cannot affect, we are in for discontent.

Is it difficult to determine what we can and cannot control? No, it’s not.

My ’60s generation emphasized a great and useful truth: what’s happening now is the most important thing. But it’s clear to me that any contentment I feel in any particular moment has much to do with details carefully orchestrated in days past. Yes, I try hard to be here now, but I spend some of that here-time focusing on actions that will ensure future moments will be what I want them to be.

WALLOWING

With my younger brother as an ally, I was brought up in my grandparents’ house in the tiny impoverished town of Port Leyden in upstate New York. It was a chaotic, unsettled family.

At seventeen, I was out of there and on the streets of the Haight district in San Francisco. It was mid-1967, the Summer of Love, when I discovered an intriguing escape from the not-so-great family situation back home. For six years I was immersed in sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. (Well, maybe not that much sex.)

In the summer of ’69 I ended up at Woodstock, the famous gathering of 500,000 in rural upstate New York. Far out, I thought. Afterward, I continued to fruitlessly seek a better state of mind, and three more years wafted by. I was the poster child for the freewheeling ’60s.

In my self-imposed stupor, there was little I didn’t complain about. I tried college but dropped out my second year, distraught in my loneliness and with my vision of a planet gone mad. In 1970, during a Washington, DC, political demonstration, I was teargassed. Literally, as the mist of gas swirled down in the middle of the cordoned-off street, I met the woman who was to be my wife and the mother of my two children. Then within weeks, with my new love in tow, I revisited the now dangerous streets of San Francisco. We lived on those streets for two months and then returned to upstate New York.

Through it all I balked at everything that didn’t align itself with my idea of rightness. I chafed at the unfairness of it all. I thought, It’s the system, stacked against me. I ranted that too many narrow-minded, selfish people were manipulating things. They were conspiring to ruin my life.

Of course, I was a beacon of equanimity.

In truth, I was a pain to everyone around me. My life was a series of dead-end jobs and personal frustrations. Profoundly unhappy, dropping out of college twice more, I was a narcissistic complainer haunted by selfimposed psychic hooligans.

In the middle of all this, I married my teargas love. Not surprisingly, my bride was equally frustrated with the unfairness of things. We were two peas in a pod, loud and bold, convinced of our rightness and everyone else’s wrongness.

Then, after too many years of floundering in this foggy, self-absorbed existence, the chains suddenly fell off one August morning. Hungover and depressed yet again, I sat at the kitchen table in our dumpy apartment in Inlet, New York. I was earning minimum wage as a seasonal worker at a State of New York recreational campsite, collecting garbage and cleaning public restrooms. I was late for work that morning, but nevertheless sat there immobile, looking inward. In that moment I declared to myself, essentially, and in not so many words, “I’m twenty-three and I’m not living like this anymore. Until now my point of view has not been working for me. No longer will I try to change the world by whining about it. There is very little outside myself I can direct, so I will stop agonizing over events beyond my reach. I’ll go back to school this fall to learn something that can be used to create a future for us. From now on there will be no more complaining. No more blaming. Rather than rejecting the world as it’s presented to me, I’m going to get inside it—as it is—and see what I can do with the parts of it that are within my grasp.”

Little did I know that my desperate acquiescence to “the system” in my early twenties would be the first step toward writing this book three decades later, a book that would point out the beauty of systems and—in their proper management—the freedoms they can provide. But unlike my preoccupations back then, what I write about here has nothing to do with fairness, politics, wishful thinking, or right and wrong. It’s about simple mechanics.

That day I enrolled in a tech college, the New York State Ranger School,¹ to study forestry and land surveying. Two weeks later we moved to the remote campus town of Wanakena, New York, in the Adirondack Mountain foothills. My fourth attempt at higher education, I put my head down, worked hard through the winter, and graduated the next summer with a simple Associate of Applied Science (AAS) degree.

Continuing to pay attention to the details, for six months I drove heavy equipment on a nearby road-construction job in order to save up enough money to move west. In November of 1974, my wife and I and our fivemonth-old son headed to Oregon with $400 in our pockets and everything we owned packed into a homemade trailer attached to the back of the Plymouth. I had taken a stand. I was improving my life—and the lives of the two people who were depending on me—by expending my energy only on the details that I could control. The fog in my head had lifted due to an absurdly simple adjustment in my thinking process.

But despite those first steps toward dealing with the real world as it is, I had not yet recognized the next necessary step that would lead to solid control of my environment and thus the ability to forge freedom and wealth. It would be another twenty-five years before I took that next step.

PERPETUAL DISAPPOINTMENT

As I look back, my best explanation for my self-imposed hubris is summed up by a famous photo taken at Woodstock. It’s one you may have seen. It’s of a lovely, slender, long-haired girl who is maybe eighteen years old. She’s beautiful and she’s dancing in a farm meadow in a long sheer dress. There are flowers in her hair and she’s laughing as she whirls with her arms stretched above her head in a casual way. Her handsome ponytailed boyfriend is dancing too. They share a peaceful ecstasy, and anyone who sees that photo would, at least for the moment, want to be one of those two young people.

The image is a declaration of pure bliss with the clear message that happiness is attainable, and the path to that place requires no more than an uninhibited persona, hip music, and an unlimited supply of drugs. With a broad metaphorical brushstroke, the message that photo paints is that freedom will arrive as soon as we drop our uptight preoccupations and, metaphorically, dance in the meadow.

Let it all hang out. Stay loose. Go with the flow.

Back to the real world. The photo is an enticement for a state of mind that exists only for brief moments. Its message on how to live is a sham. One can’t just lighten up and expect ongoing happiness! Life doesn’t work that way.

But many of us who evolved from that era continue to think life should be that way.

We bask in wealth never seen before, but wonder why we are unsatisfied. Fifty years after Woodstock, that silly, self-absorbed perspective has carried over to a vast swath of our children and grandchildren. Generations of us live from day to day in perpetual disappointment within a world that refuses to conform to our expectations.

(Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like focusing on negatives, and it’s a bit painful for me to discuss the unhappy contortions of my ’60s generation. But it’s a necessary discussion for presenting the work-the-system premise, so I have to start here—in the negative—in order to set the stage for the rest of the story, which I promise you will find uplifting.)

Too many of us—old and young—finger-point and complain and wonder at our dissatisfaction. It’s too bad we do that because it’s not just depressing, it’s a distraction from what we actually need to do to find life satisfaction and to contribute. Excuses, generalizations about the alleged dire state of the world, and under-the-radar as well as overt attempts to change the people around us are ineffectual to the point of paralysis. These preoccupations are diversions from the personal actions we could take that would actually produce what we claim to want in our individual lives: peace, prosperity, and control of our own destinies. And pursuing peace, prosperity, and control are noble goals because the sure way to realize those goals is to contribute to the people around us.

And what about the generally accepted notion that someone who seeks firm control is an unpleasant personality, someone who needs to lighten up? I submit that this premise is wrong. Back in upstate New York as I sat at that kitchen table at the age of twenty-three, it dawned on me that happiness would not be found in control over others or in complaining about world conditions or in finding the perfect drug. It would be found by paying attention to the moment-to-moment details of my own existence.

But as the three of us drove west to Oregon back in late 1974, what I didn’t fully see—as illustrated by the dancing girl photo—was that gaining command of one’s life can’t be found by manipulating it from the outside. Personal control will only occur after a mind shift inside.

Your Circle of Influence

A concept made popular by Stephen Covey, the circle of influence analogy illustrates one’s level of control. In years past I was hardly able to direct my own comings and goings due to whatever psychological funk was eating me up in the moment. As I stood in the center of it, my circle of influence felt like it was inches in diameter. Today my circle feels as if it’s miles across as the days effortlessly sail by and I am able to accomplish nearly all that I set out to do. This gives me great satisfaction as I grasp that the wheels of today’s personal progress keep turning due to the work I do inside my circle—not because I have spent time railing at conditions outside of it.

Take a moment to imagine your own circle. How large is it? Is it just six inches in diameter? If it is, when you look down upon it is the top hidden underneath your feet? If the tiny circle is a cone and just twelve inches in height, you can barely balance on it. Do you spend all your available energy and attention just trying not to fall off? If this is your situation, your tenuous balancing effort doesn’t leave much time for anything but complaining. Instead, what if you could channel the time and energy expended in this constant balancing effort into making your circle larger?

Whatever the size of your circle, focus on making changes inside it, not outside. Don’t spend precious time agonizing over big-picture issues you can’t control while neglecting the elements of your own life that you can easily modify. Expend your life’s limited and precious allotment of time and energy on the matters you can adjust, the matters within your circle. Do that and your circle—and therefore your influence—will expand.

LIFE IS A STREAMING VIDEO, NOT A SNAPSHOT

Outside of brief moments within that encapsulated era, the unbridled approach of the ’60s was just another great idea that didn’t work. It was a theory of living that didn’t consider how we actually are, but instead declared how we should be. If the Woodstock meadow-dancing photo had been a documentary movie, the hours and days surrounding that dance would tell a different story.

The truth of Woodstock? The nonstop music was good, but few bands played their best due to the confusion and extensive drug ingestion. Yes, it was peaceful, but after that first glorious day it was cold and wet and we sat in the mud shivering, drenched, hungry, and thirsty. Huddled in the rain, a half million of us worked hard to relax, insistent in our success at finding freedom and joy outside the system. Peace, brother! In the downpour, over and over again we told ourselves that all we needed was love. Yes, we really had jumped outside the everyday troublesome world, but in our T-shirts, jeans, and little else, we were utterly unprepared. We shivered, as the cold, relentless torrent hammered down.

It was no contest as soft theory met bare-knuckled mechanical reality.

With the inevitability of a wave washing onto shore, the enthusiasm faded as the filth that comes with neglected crowds began to accumulate. After forty-eight hours of this, a general paranoia swept through the cowering drug-addled horde, and my friend John and I got out of there. We left before Jimi Hendrix had taken the stage. It was that bad.

Listening to the radio as we headed home in my beat-up wreck of a car, we were reminded of Vietnam, racial unrest, and political deviousness. And beyond those negatives, both college dropouts, we each worked graveyard union jobs in a local paper mill; and as we drove home through the night, exhausted and depressed, it was clear that the joy we experienced at Woodstock fell within just a narrow sliver in time.

John was eighteen years old. I was nineteen. We were party guys and proud of our chaotic lifestyles. We never thought of the relationship between our undirected lives and our unhappiness. As I think back and analyze, it occurs to me that the ones who were creating something worthwhile were the ones we called the “straight” kids. They were not immune to down times, but in their willingness to conform to the reality of planet Earth and to face existence head on, they were more in control, more courageous, and yes, happier.

The lure of dancing in the meadow is an invitation to illusionary bliss. Truth is, orderliness and attention to detail are the roots of peace. Proof? Consider the indis...